... and, increasingly, (in France and Italy) the unelected and unaccountable check on the elected. A new alliance? Meanwhile, a new generation of European right political leaders is trying to bring faith-based groups, business interests and the middling sort into a new alliance without the traditional criminal element. Anti-criminality and reform are no longer affairs for communists and socialists alone. It is this shift of priorities on the European Right towards neo-liberalism and towards an almost neo-conservative view on democracy that has made the recent Buttiglione affair so interesting. The idea that a Christian Democrat linked to the Church could credibly act as EU Justice and Security Minister was intended to be a cultural signal to the Italian ...

... press conferences about the in-fighting inside the UDA, dropped a few hints about the left orientation of Herron and Elliot, and disappeared. (See, for example, Sunday Times 28 January 1973) At various times the UCA were said to have been in discussions with the Peoples' Democracy group, the Official IRA, the British and Irish Communist Group and the Communist Party. The truth of these reports is impossible to evaluate. This is an extremely complicated episode in an extremely confusing period. The best published account of the period I know is in Political Murder in Northern Ireland (Martin Dillon and Dennis Lehane, Penguin 1973), especially chapter 12. My best estimate is ...

... about economic policy for the past 25 years was wrong; and imagine how difficult this makes things for the current leadership. They cannot say, 'We're terribly sorry: we've been wrong for the last 25 years. We plumped for the City and ignored the manufacturing base.’ Politicians don't do this. Political parties not seeking election – e.g. the Communist Party of Great Britain – can say such things (and the CPGB did circa 1990). But for parties engaged in electoral politics this is impossible. Or is perceived as impossible. They are forced to change their policies while pretending all was well when they were in office. (Or almost well: they may acknowledge little things ...

... Next Issue 52 Empire's Workshop Greg Grandin New York: Metropolitan books, 2006, $25.00 Reviewed by Adrian Kozlowski Reviewing a biography of Harold Laski in 1953,( [1]) the historian A. J. P. Taylor remarked on 'the dilemma of our times': that 'no-one who believes in liberty can ever work sincerely with communists, or trust them, yet no-one who has socialism in his bones can ever condemn communism without reserve.' During the Cold War, leftist critics of US foreign policy had another dilemma to consider: how much weight to give their criticisms in the light of Stalinism's crimes. Greg Grandin, New York University professor of Latin American studies ...

... peddling absolute garbage about Permindex- the conspiracy not only including the Kennedy assassination, but also the domination of the West by the British(!)- supplemented by a disgusting dose of anti-Semitism.(l3) This foreign material on Shaw and Kennedy was potentially fascinating but nobody seemed to notice that it was all coming from one direction- Communist sources: Il Paese Sera and L'Unita were both Italian Communist Party papers. And while some of the information seems to have been true, the way it was presented, and the distortion of the evidence suggest that this was a case of disinformation. (14) And this wasn't the first time that IPS had disseminated half-truths. An ...

... (13), The Charlie Rose Show. Thanks to Harlan Girard for the transcript.) So, another little piece of the jig-saw of post-war MI5 operations falls into place: MI5 were running students who pretended to be left-wing to attract recruiters- and presumably without success, since not a whisper of this has hitherto appeared. No more communist threat? If the MI5 brochure offers a very thing version of the organisation's history, it does answer the question, 'How have they responded to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the British Left?' S'easy-peasy, mate; nothing to it. The subversive hunters and the spy-watchers have become anti-terrorists. The brochure tells ...

... . One was Alan Weinstein's Perjury, a study of the Hiss case, which concluded that, after all, he had indeed been guilty. Perjury enabled Podhoretz, for example, to see that: "In exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, Congressman (sic) Richard Nixon made a major contribution to the bringing home of the Communist menace and therefore to the mobilisation of popular support for an interventionist foreign policy." (15) For a member of the Israeli lobby in 1976 when that was written 'an interventionist foreign policy' meant something quite specific. The other book, of course, was Legend, which did for Oswald what Perjury had done for Hiss. ...

... to con people (and possibly themselves). The right has interests not ideas. 3. Many on the right are really much further right than they admit in public. Behind the conservative is the proto- fascist. (The fascist menace.) In the mirror image, behind the social democrat is the revolutionary left. (The communist menace.)36 As well as being a reflexive response, 'contamination' or anathematisation is a tactic used by the left (and right) to attack opponents; and, within their internal politics, to exclude or undermine actual or potential opposition in the struggle for power and control of the political agenda. Allied to party or group ...

... expeditious for the federal government to absorb the cost and responsibility for political policing. The result was the creation of the FBI. The infamous J. Edgar Hoover exploited the emerging mass media to create a popular image of most wanted criminals and the need for G- men to capture or kill them. The twin threats of spectacular criminals and communist subversives fed the FBI director's greed for power over what became a kind of federal secret police. At almost the same time, Harry Anslinger, previously an officer in the Pennsylvania Railroad Police who married into the 158 Summer 2010 Mellon dynasty, seized the threat of post-war population shifts and mobilisation among African-Americans to promote the early phase of America's ...

... some interest that I received a copy of Dr Coleman's magazine, World in Review. WIR vol 6 no. 5 is mostly chunks from Coleman's books which, from these extracts, appear to be the standard populist, back-to-the-constitution stuff which now passes for thought on the further fringe of the U.S. right, liberally dosed with now rather archaic communist conspiracy stuff. In the pursuit of which, in an open letter to a U.S. senator, Coleman produces one of the great non-sequitors. 'If you do not believe that Roosevelt was a Communist, view the footage by C.N.N. covering the dedication of the F.D.R. memorial in Washington D.C., and you will see the designer ...